You know, one of these days I'm pretty sure they're going to make a super-realistic animatronic replica of Jurassic Park, and I am so there. The world needs a free-range robot dinosaur park. I guarantee, no matter how much you have to pay to construct it, you'll make a killing. Figuratively speaking. I mean, there's a slight chance that the robots could go berserk and kill everyone, but I'm willing to take that risk.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - With the blood, and the kicking and the biting with the metal teeth and the hurting and shoving.
PPS - I'm sure we can fix it with flash photography.

Better baggage retrieval

I think we could do better with baggage retrieval at airports using technology. Instead of having one big conveyor belt and a crowd of people who could easily mistake someone else's luggage for theirs, or could just wander up and take whichever one they like, we should have a system of RFID tags on luggage so that they can be identified throughout the flight and when you land. Then, at the baggage claim, bags are unloaded as before, but then held in individual bays awaiting claim. To claim your own bag, you take your boarding pass and scan it at a machine which recognises the tag, matches it to a bag and sends it down for you. If the airport doesn't have this system, they can still use their old single-conveyor method.

Now, how can this system fail? Well, if you lose your boarding pass on the plane, you'll have to go and see customer service to get your bag with some other ID. There won't, however, be a situation where your bag gets picked up by someone else by mistake unless you manage to mix up your boarding passes. What if someone steals your boarding pass in order to take your bag? Well, they could take your bag anyway, in the current system, but this way you have a chance for the machine to take their picture when they claim the bag, to give some hint who might have it. If your bag is misrouted? You find out right away when you go to claim it, rather than sitting there and waiting for all the other bags to be claimed first.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The thing is, it's fairly expensive to implement and provides only minimal benefit.
PPS - To the airlines, that is.

Camping on the sea

Having a boat with a sleeping cabin is kind of like glamping on the sea or driving your camper van into the desert and just parking wherever.

So, from now on, I think I'm going to call yachts "the trailers of the sea".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It should make me feel better about not owning one.
PPS - Though that doesn't come up much and it's not really a life goal of mine.

Learning actors' names

I make it a point to learn actors' names once I've known them in two or more performances I've enjoyed, or in one very significant one. This is why I know names like Christian Kane and Morena Baccarin. It's important to me to know them as a name rather than a vague collection of typecast roles, like "that guy who was a lawyer in Angel, then the tough guy in Leverage and also the Librarians".

I also sometimes deliberately learn the name of "the other guy" in famous movie duos. Like Keanu Reeves and that other guy in Bill and Ted. Even though Alex Winter hasn't worked much since then, I'd hate to be known as just "the other guy", so I do them the courtesy I'd expect for myself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Now, if only I could be this good about the people I actually meet.
PPS - I've proven I can do it. I just need to focus.

Thank teachers for their service

I've seen the phrase "Thank you for your service" extended to basically every soldier that appears on screen these days, when they encounter civilians. I think that exact same phrase and respect should be extended, verbatim, to teachers. Just sayin'.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I know a few.
PPS - They're undervalued by some people and taken for granted by most.

Designing houses through living in configurable spaces

I think it would be an interesting experiment to put a family or a group of people into one big warehouse space with movable walls plus power and plumbing easily moved around and just see how the space ends up being configured over time. Do you end up with separate bedrooms for everyone as far away from each other as possible? Does everyone tend to get their own living space, or are we happy with one to share? Would people try really unusual things like a single washbasin in a bedroom instead of a full ensuite?

It would all depend on the type of people you put in the space, of course. Fiercely individual people would probably end up in more of an apartment setup, with everything self-contained. Families might use more space than they expect. Single people might find themselves happy with relatively small living spaces and lots of storage.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess I've been thinking about living spaces lately.
PPS - My interests come and go in waves.

Estimating software is really hard

Are software estimates valuable? It's hard to say. We, as programmers, feel that estimates are very difficult to obtain, usually inaccurate and therefore something of a waste of time. Managers, on the other hand, have a certain budget available and often a certain time frame, too. They want to know if a project will fit into those constraints or, if they are a particularly talented manager, what subset of the blue-sky-dream requirements can be completed within that budget and time. Estimates are the way budgets turn into project plans.

The problem is that software estimates are always a tricky beast. Software isn't like constructing a building. It's more like designing a building for a swarm of robots to build in seconds for no cost. All the effort in software is design effort, not construction, and design is the hard part to pin down.

When you design a building, you have some solid requirements to work from. It will be this tall, with this many floors, we want this many units or offices inside, and this many car parking spaces. That, in turn, leads to some other calculated requirements - to serve that many floors, you need this many lifts. Fire stairwells are this size and regulations require two of them. Concrete can support this much weight per unit surface area. You know what you're getting into.

Software, so far, doesn't have any of that, and might never do. Also, by the time you're done finding out how large the project is, that's part of the design work. If, for instance, you're trying to measure business software by the number of database tables required, then you need to find out what tables are needed and count them. Finding out what tables are needed, though, means gathering all the requirements and designing tables to store the relevant data and oh, look, now you've done a database schema to estimate how long it will take to develop a database schema. It's almost as if the nature of software rebels against being quantified before it is completed. Unfortunately, "I'll know how much it will cost when I'm done spending the money" isn't a satisfying or wise answer to the question of budgets.

So what can we do? Maybe skilled managers have better intuition about how large a project will be, based on some imprecise metrics. If I know we're dealing with five kinds of business data here, then we'll probably have (for instance) 50 tables (10 per data type) and 10 major processes to write (interactions between the major data types), and from there we can guess how long that will take (assuming we know our team well).

The best way, probably, is to say "This is what we want to get done. We have up to this amount of money, or up to this time to do as much as we can. How close might we get to perfection?"

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have to plead ignorance on how other industries estimate their work.
PPS - Except sometimes when I saw managers give a gut-feel guess and everyone called it good.

The "solution" to short phone battery life

So, these days, we seem to be solving the problem of woeful phone battery life by making people carry an extra "turbo charger" or backup battery around with them, to boost the battery when we're away from power and still need our phone to work for, oh, 8 hours at a time.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate the way market demands have completely screwed us over here? I mean, if we weren't demanding that our phone batteries get a couple of millimetres thinner every year, they could actually work long enough for our phones to last an entire day.

Honestly, when you hear that your phone comes with a big brick of a backup battery for on-the-go charging, your response should not be positive. You should be thinking about why the internal battery sucks so hard.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Market pressure being what it is, though, this is the market solution.
PPS - Personally, I'd rather have a battery that doesn't suck.

Modular jewellery boxes

You know, there never seems to be enough of the right kind of space in a jewellery box, from what I've seen. I think it would be both neat and useful to have a modular system where different tiny boxes clip or stick together to form one large box that can expand or contract into sizes, shapes and configurations far beyond its original arrangement. Of course, it's probably not going to be quite as pretty as custom-made, one-size-fits-all boxes, but maybe you can make the pieces out of wood with magnets embedded in them, to keep it looking good.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or keep it simple and just use stackable drawers.
PPS - And probably some dividers inside the drawers, too.

The problems of account recovery

We have enough services online now, holding enough personal information in each, that it is possible to put together a very comprehensive profile of personal information based on what each company chooses to withhold and reveal, and using social engineering to fill in the rest (tricking customer service to reveal personal info over the phone).

So what can we do about that? Well, until we have better standards for information privacy online, there's not a lot we can do. If each company is free to make up their own minds about what should remain secret and what information is required to verify identity, we, the public, will still be vulnerable to these cross-service attacks.

Getting that legislation into effect is a big, difficult step, though. We still need to be able to identify people worldwide with information that is not unique to a given company, but the person themselves, and that is the exact key to these cross-service vulnerabilities in the first place. If my mother's maiden name is the backup "password" for account recovery on every service I use, then that one bit of info can be used to hijack all of those accounts by just calling customer service, then saying I've lost my password when I moved house. As far as the company knows, then, that invalidates just about everything they know about me - phone number, email and postal address - leaving just name, account number and mother's maiden name. And you can't just allow someone with that info to cancel the account, either, because that's a different kind of attack. You can't use social security number, either, because that's unique to Americans and if it's known in more than one place, then it's a vulnerability, not an account recovery strength.

Unfortunately, there may not be a solution to this problem. What we need for account recovery is a shared secret known only to the customer and that particular company, and one that can't be lost or forgotten. The best way would be to register these details with a trusted third party like an attorney. Generate a truly random key for each company account, register it in person with an attorney and go back to them if account recovery is needed. We give up convenience, but we gain security.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At this point, any gain in security might be worth it.
PPS - Worth it for customers, that is. The companies won't like it.

Prioritisation

The killer feature of productivity software and methods should be prioritisation rather than filing. We deal with such a large volume of inbound traffic in our digital lives, from social media to email to articles and videos from our favourite websites that we need systems to help us focus on the most important things first. Facebook already tries to show you what's most important on your Timeline, but as far as Facebook is concerned, Facebook is all there is. What we need is a way to draw absolutely everything in our lives, from all that digital stuff above to the actions and projects, movies, TV shows, books and so on into one inbound stream, or as few streams as possible. That makes the next step easier: figuring out what's most important out of everything.

This will always take some time. After all, there's always more stuff coming in, and you'll always have to deal with it. However, if you're dealing with the most important stuff first, and you know that it's properly organised, you'll know that everything is as good as it can get. There's no need to stress that you aren't dealing with the hundred and three things that came in this morning when thirty of them are company update fluff from upper-upper management and another thirty are a passive-aggressive "reply-all" war about no business of yours. This, to me, is a key of GTD. Consolidate your inboxes, your filing and your action lists, prioritise them properly and then just do the work. It gets really hard to do sometimes, but it's absolutely worth it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I have too many digital inboxes that refuse to play nice.
PPS - One day, I'll figure out how to manage them better from a single interface.

Between share housing and independent housing

Would you agree to live in the equivalent of student housing if the rent or prices were lower? If you had less space and shared bathrooms but gained an inner-city location, would it matter to you? I'm not sure. For me, I don't think I need my shower and toilet to be *in* my house as long as it's in the same building.

When you think about it, this is kind of a step between a share house and your own house. In a shared rental situation, you get your own room, but you have to make do with one kitchen, one lounge and one or two bathrooms. In your own house, you get all of those things to yourself, but for a higher price. There may be room in the middle for independent living with some shared facilities, but more available than just at universities.

Then again, plenty of people will not be willing to give up their ensuites and the privilege of shuffling naked to the toilet in the middle of the night. One day, we may see that arrangement as the "first class" equivalent of living spaces, compared to economy (share housing) and business class (student housing). I've actually never lived in either a share house or student housing, though, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For me, it would remind me of church camp.
PPS - And as long as it's clean, what's the harm?

The problem with prison

Before our morality fully develops, we picture prison as a place where bad people go to be punished. We don't want prison to be a comfortable or nice place, because it's for bad people. A lot of people never really grow out of that mental image.

The problem with prison, to me, is that criminals are a drain on society whether they're in prison or out. Economically, the best result of prison sentences should be rehabilitation - turning criminals into non-criminals. That doesn't happen automatically, and it doesn't work on everyone, but it should definitely be the goal. Otherwise, we're losing to criminal enterprises on the outside, or we're paying a large amount to keep criminals locked up. If we can, instead, vastly reduce the rate of reoffences, we'll start seeing some economic benefit. It will take a lot of time for society to change its collective mind about criminals, but if we can view prison as more of a hospital for criminal minds, rather than a dark pit we put people we'd rather not deal with, that will be a start.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There are probably fewer criminals unable to be rehabilitated than you think.
PPS - Or I'm a naive optimist.

Don't pre-reject your work

I read Chuck Wendig's (typically profanity-ridden) rant about "pre-rejection" which is what I've been doing to, well, everything I write, basically. Except the flash fiction I vomited straight to the web that one year when I was actually writing. I've been stowing away my pieces because they're "not good enough".

Well, Chuck would have some harsh words to say about that, and I really need to listen. The point is, I've got a couple of pieces I'm sitting on because I've pre-rejected them and I've decided they don't belong out in the world for whatever reason. It was some time ago that I promised to start submitting to real publishers, and it's high time I lived up to that promise, starting as soon as possible.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And that story I actually sold still hasn't run.
PPS - I'm kind of starting to think it won't, which is a demoralising thing to happen to your first sale.

Diversifying Hollywood

Hollywood may need to start doing more with less in the future. Putting all their eggs in very few baskets of the "traditional" Summer blockbuster is going to prove a more and more risky proposition until all we get year to year are endless Transformers sequels, cut and pasted from previous scripts. Sooner or later, someone will stumble onto the obvious idea of diversifying their portfolio, figuring out how to make better movies for less money or just making a wider variety of movies.

I think, in general, the days of the behemoth movie companies are numbered. When they collapse, there will be a lot of creative people with nothing to do, but a love of movies and visual entertainment. Those people will probably start making lots of smaller movies on shoestring budgets and putting them online.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For some people, that's probably all they can do, and so they did.
PPS - And I'm glad for it.

I assume all calls are scams

If you as a company are initiating a customer call, it should be standard practice to identify yourself first. Otherwise the call comes to the customer and basically goes:

"Hi, this is 'Robert' from Telstra, can I please have your full name and date of birth to verify your identity?"

Your immediate answer should be "What? No, sorry, I have no way of knowing you're really from Telstra."

Unfortunately, at that point, you run into a bit of an impasse. The customer shouldn't divulge any information over the phone until he or she is satisfied they're talking to the real company. The company shouln't offer customer information over the phone until they're sure they're talking to the real customer.

The only way I can see this going well is for the company to call the customer and ask them to call back on a publicly-listed customer service number to complete the call. That way, the customer starts with reasonable confidence that they're talking to the right company, and the company can ask for identity confirmation. Unsolicited calls, unfortunately, need to start with a high level of distrust, because scam callers have broken the whole industry.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I tend to do just as the title says.
PPS - It makes receiving calls awkward, but more secure.

Google robot cars to update street view?

I wonder if Google's robot cars are expected to update Google Street View more or less non-stop. That would be a pretty big advantage for the company, to have up-to-the-day visual data on city streets, but it could also raise some privacy concerns. Right now, Street View is updated at intervals of a few years, in Australia at least. That's at the level where getting caught on Street View is kind of a novelty and something you might even aim for. If, however, there are Street View captures every single day in some places, then you're more likely to consider it a bit of an invasion. You don't want to get caught on Street View every single day on your way to work. You don't want the only "safe" place to be inside the car itself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It puts us under surveillance.
PPS - So do security cameras, but those results aren't just available to everyone.

The internet is confronting

The internet brought together all people, whether they wanted to be together or not. It challenged old racist and sexist stereotypes by having actual, accidental contact between awful people and the people they despised or misunderstood. By this process, it raised the hackles of those awful people, and their first-generation response is to unionise their awfulness, banding together to reinforce their old ideas to each other and convince themselves that the world is wrong, not them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think that will be the response forever, though.
PPS - I mean, I hope so.

We know the supervillain wanted to get caught

At this point in our superhero movie and TV history, it is reasonable to assume that the villains want to get caught as part of their plan, and that the heroes should definitely plan to do something different to counteract that. If the villain assumes he or she will be caught and will be interred somewhere specific, change that arrangement. Move the facility, audit the security, chain them to a post in the ground in the middle of the desert, anything but the flimsy cell in the middle of the police station or even the standard supervillain prison where all his/her friends are kept, even if that's in specially-designed, isolated cells.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's the new common sense.
PPS - Which means it's time the trope was subverted.

An easier home dishwasher

Unloading a dishwasher can be a pain, and, a lot of the time, it feels really unnecessary. Why go unloading it if the dirty dishes are just going right back in afterwards? Why not just have dishwaser drawers everywhere and, when they're dirty, just run them and the dishes are clean again.

Well, the first problem with that is expense, of course. If every drawer is a dishwasher, then every drawer is as expensive as a dishwasher, too. Instead, I think the best idea is to model your dishwasher setup after commercial kitchens. The dishwasher there is a pull-down square hood that you load and unload with heavy plastic sliding trays of whatever you want. So you have one dishwasher and a lot of trays, and you just put the trays away in your cupboards when they're washed. A little drainage for the runoff and you're set.

Now, your kitchen might start looking a lot more industrial than you'd like, but for some people who prefer function over fashion, I think this is exactly the kind of solution they need.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've been mulling this one over for a while, since my brother-in-law expressed a desire for the dishwasher drawer design.
PPS - It's still very much a first-world problem, especially since the solution will run into several thousands of dollars.

Preventing HIV infection with drugs

Apparently there was a study recently on a potential HIV-preventative drug that found it could be up to 90% effective for preventing new infections if taken daily. However, a very large number of the participants who were given the drug to take daily during the study failed to do so, and some contracted HIV as a result. Despite this, the scientists were able to create a statistical model based on the amount of the drug present in blood samples in the trial group.

So here's my question. You (hypothetically) have been identified as an individual at risk of HIV infection due to your lifestyle, and you agree to participate in a drug trial for the prevention of that fatal infection. You are provided with the drug for free, plus education on how to reduce your risk of infection via other means, then you go home, go out, neglect to take the potentially life-saving drug, engage in exactly the same risky behaviours as before and get HIV. You will now die.

I'm stunned by this. Really. If I were the scientist administering the study, the first person in the trial group who showed no detectable levels of the drug in their system plus an HIV infection would have gotten a sharp dope-slap to the head. The second person maybe a disapproving glare. From the third onwards, a resigned sigh.

The only thing I can think is that these people are so hopelessly lost to themselves that they didn't see the point in trying to prevent infection and prolonging their lives anyway. And now that I've come to that realisation, it makes me sad. To think that there are people so lost and hopeless in the world that they don't really care if they live or die. It's heartbreaking.

Please, if you're prescribed life-saving medication because your doctor thinks it's a good idea, even if you're too depressed to care if it works, please take it. Please. It would be a tragedy to the world if you were to die, as much as it is a tragedy for anyone else to die.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, it's either depression or the "it's treatable" mindset.
PPS - Treatment should be a last resort. An ounce of prevention, etc.

The coffee cups on TV are empty

I hate being able to tell that the coffee cups on screen in a TV show or movie are empty. Actors come in carrying two in one hand at odd angles, set them down quickly and heavily, someone else picks one up and tilts it almost horizontal to sip from it when it's supposed to be fresh and new. It's just a detail I notice that pulls me out of the action and says "this thing you're watching is fake".

The thing is, the fix is super-easy: fill them with water. For any other beverage container - a wine glass, a regular drinking glass, a bottle of water - directors or props people put something in them. For some reason coffee cups are immune to this treatment and are carried empty. No doubt it saves them several seconds of preparation and avoids spills, but I think the main motivation is "it won't be visible, so don't bother". And they're probably stretched pretty thin already to bother with details like this. Still, if I were in charge, I'd make sure the coffee cups were filled, because it's a pet peeve of mine.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps some props people do fill the cups.
PPS - And perhaps I never noticed those because it looked normal.

How to fall in love

I read an article about a scientific formula for falling in love, and it got me thinking. Basically it's a guided discussion comprising 36 "get to know you" type questions, followed by 4 minutes of constant eye contact. What I wondered was how much of this you could sort of weaponise and deploy against an unsuspecting person if they weren't playing along. Several of the questions ask for each partner to share something in turn, such as a positive observation about their partner, which you might not be able to do to a person who wasn't knowingly participating, and the uninterrupted eye contact would be hard to pull off on someone unsuspecting. Still, some parts could definitely work.

The catch is that this isn't designed to elicit one-way affection. The method is designed to pull two people close in mutual affection, so attempting to use this as a way to just get laid will only work if you're a psychopath.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'll be trying this my wife for Valentine's Day.
PPS - I might let you know how it goes.

Swatting is a trust issue

Swatting - the practise of calling in fake anonymous tips to the police to get someone's house raided by a SWAT team - is a security issue, at its core, because it hinges on an abuse of implicit trust. The police trust that an anonymous tip is completely genuine and so urgent that they can't delay acting on it. That trust should not be so easily manipulated. By all means, act on anonymous tips, but it needs to take more than "I'm not telling you who I am but there are guns and drugs at this address and they know you're coming". Maybe send someone around to look the place over first, or quickly check whether the area has seen any bad activity lately. Don't just rush off at the first hint of a chance to use your ex-military tanks and grenade launchers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - We do still need the ability to call in anonymous tips, though.
PPS - I just think the police need to be more careful with them.

You're allowed to correct your outdated trivia game cards

If you play trivia games, you know that sometimes the answers can get outdated, such as "Which movie holds the record for the most Oscar nominations?", depending on when the game was published. People become angry or discouraged at such outdated answers, but why not correct them yourself? You don't need the publisher to produce a whole new version just for you. If you know the answer is wrong now, you could break out a label printer and just stick the right answer on the card, over the old one. Would that be so bad? Yes, you'd be "defacing" the game, but would you rather have a game card that's pristine and wrong, or one that's right?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Somehow it gains more weight when someone else prints things for you.
PPS - I can see this becoming less of a hangup in the future.

Lame Facebook quizzes

Sometimes I look at the ridiculous online quiz results people post to Facebook and roll my eyes. "What's your old-person name?" "How weird are you?" "Which 90s sitcom hairstyle are you?" Most of them seem lame and absurd, certainly not worth my time and very likely not worth anyone else's time either.

However, despite my disdain for them, I won't put anyone down for posting them, because I think they serve another purpose, too: introspection. These days, we spend far too little time thinking about and observing our own behaviour critically. We just kind of let it happen and tell people it's their problem if they don't find us acceptable. These quizzes are the only introspection some people get, and the only hint that they might not be perfect - that there might be some room for improvement in their lives.

From that point of view, I consider it a good thing that lame Facebook quizzes exist. Even though it's done somewhat in public, it encourages the kind of private, critical self-reflection that is so rare in the world these days.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I still won't take any of them myself.
PPS - Well, hardly ever.

Mental health

We talk about mental health and mental illness quite often these days. Is it taking the metaphor too far to say we should practise good mental nutrition and get plenty of mental exercise? Well, whether or not it stretches the metaphor, I think the mental equivalent of eating junk food and sitting still all day is bound to catch up with you, one way or another.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Probably not with a serious mental illness, though.
PPS - Just mental laziness.

I'm not a fan of horror

I'm not a big fan of horror in general, but I think it's modern horror in general that I have a problem with. See, old-school horror wanted to scare you with monsters or aliens - things that aren't real - and let you get on with your life afterwards. You get a good scare, but you can let it go because it is so clearly fiction that it doesn't really stick with you. Modern horror, on the other hand, wants to be completely plausible, get right down there inside your head and settle in for the rest of your natural life, burning in the impression that, with just a tiny little push, your life could be precisely this horrifying, not even kidding a little bit. Old-school horror wanted to give your heart a little shot of adrenaline. Modern horror wants you to have PTSD. Forever.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Oh, and the authors are really good at it, too.
PPS - I suppose I could desensitise myself, but that seems like a lot of work for a small payoff.

3D printing out-of-production materials

Perhaps one of the big advantages for 3D printing technology as it becomes more common will be the ability to reproduce old things - materials and objects that have been destroyed or are no longer in production. For example, we had some yellow textured glass in our patio in the home where I grew up. About two decades after the house was built, someone threw a rock through two panels of that glass. We were unable to find an exact replacement and instead settled for a pretty close match. With more advanced manufacturing technology, we might have been able to have an exact match produced fairly easily. The same would go for tiles.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - For books produced these days, "out of print" is an absurd notion.
PPS - When that happens to physical objects, too, the world will quietly change again.

A la carte TV subscription is not what we envisioned

We are sort of beginning to get a-la-carte pay TV, where you can choose just the channels you want from a wide selection, but it's not quite what I imagined or hoped for. What I imagined was one service (though multiple competing services would be better) with a wide range of channel selections available and the ability to choose only those you want to pay for, not to be forced to buy them in bundles.

What we are beginning to see now are many individual online services - Netflix, Quickflix, Hulu - with different exclusive content each, making them the equivalent of the "channels" of traditional pay TV. Each one has its own subscription costs, which means you're paying individually for the particular shows you desire. So there we are, paying for individual "channels" based on the content we want. It's just a much more disjointed and unsatisfying experience than what we want as consumers.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And consumer desires tend to be at odds with company desires for profit.
PPS - Which is basically an explanation for the entire entertainment industry.

Positive speaking

I have a theory that how we talk about situations, objects and people to each other and to ourselves affects the way we perceive those things. For instance, if you constantly refer to your phone as "this stupid thing", you're not going to develop a healthy relationship with it, are you? You'll be less patient with it and more eager to rid yourself of it, because it's not "my beautiful new phone" any more, just "this stupid thing". It's much easier to attach more negative epithets to "this stupid thing" even than to "my phone". "This stupid thing" can easily turn into "this stupid, slow, ugly thing" and retain those associations for a long time.

I'm not sure what the process of cause and effect is, and it could easily be that the negative associations latch on and cause the insulting name rather than the name causing negative associations, but the point when you assign a negative name must come with some baggage, one way or another.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do try not to do this myself.
PPS - It's harder than you think, sometimes.

How to punish financial crime

The punishment for financial crime should be the surrendering of your entire net worth, right down to the bone, with a 10% "finder's fee" allocated to the auditor (or whoever) that discovers the fraud (or whatever). The beautiful part is that this becomes a self-policing system. If you, as an investigator, are tempted to look the other way for a bribe, you become the very type of person the other regulators are chasing, and you risk your entire fortune as a result. If you manage to hide your assets under some other person's name, you make them an accomplice and they forfeit everything, too.

It doesn't even have to act as a deterrent, because you'd be systematically stripping the corrupt of their hard-stolen cash and at the very least forcing them to start over while the government finally gets all the taxes they've dodged over the years and then some. Everyone wins except the people who defrauded the system. And their dependents, actually, I suppose. Still, with the government suddenly coming into these huge piles of cash, there should be plenty to allocate to welfare systems.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It might be hard to get at the cash if it's in offshore banks.
PPS - And this might be kind of extreme, but we're in extreme wealth disparity right now.

Big finish, jazz hands

Weight: 81.5kg
Distance: 11.32km
Time: 1h:17m:16s
Average speed: 8.79kph

Told you I'd make up for yesterday. Today I went out running on the streets, as I used to do, and I followed my old long route, which I haven't run in quite a while. 10km is no slouch. I'm not that happy with the speed, but the exercise watch had me on "hard" mode, which is its lowest setting. I've also discovered that running on the road is very different to running on a treadmill. I'm convinced that the treadmill does half the work for you. Treadmill momentum is nothing like the real thing. It was harder than I expected, is what I'm saying, but I made it.

Over the month, I ran a total of 170.7km. That's pretty darn long. It's the equivalent of just over 4 marathons, except for the fact that they make you run a marathon all at once. I'd like to try that some day. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow I rest my legs at last. As an experiment, running every day in January has taught me mostly that I need to rest regularly, that my knees need care, my achilles tendons are always tight and that I can do this. I look forward to challenging myself in other ways through the year.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And I still look forward to a finished bathroom at home.
PPS - It's getting really close, but not there yet.

For a change

Weight: 82.3kg
Distance: About 1.5km. Oh, plus 1km on the exercise bike.
Time: Maybe 10 minutes?
Average speed: A little bit meaningless today.

Let me explain.

Instead of a full 5km run today, I had a personal training session with Debbie and our regular trainer, Jodie. It went pretty well for me, but highlighted the exact narrow focus my January running schedule has had. Getting through cardio? Zero problems. I mean, she had us warm up with 60 seconds on an 11.5% incline and I jogged it easily, even after warming up for a few minutes at a fast pace. We did 1km on the exercise bikes. No problems. We finished on the elliptical, going 150 metres, though not as fast as usual. I kept going a little while afterwards.

But could I do a second set of 10 pushups? No sir, I could not. My noodly arms were definitely not up to the challenge of lifting me off the ground a couple of times in a row. And why should they be? They hardly ever have to do that. They'll be doing more of it in February, I'll tell you that. Plus some other, non-exercise stuff. So, basically, I felt good about the cardio, but kind of inadequate at the strength parts. And a little bit bad about not running a full 5km today, but I still consider myself exercised.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I do plan to make up for it tomorrow, on the last day.
PPS - Looking forward to that very much.

It's all uphill from here

Weight: 81.8kg
Distance: 5.49km
Time: 37m:01s
Average speed: 8.90kph

There is no flat, only uphill on level 5, after the first 300 metres. I didn't make it all at the 10kph pace I set for myself, but I only slowed down to a fast walk for about half a kilometre. So I did struggle, but I made it. I wouldn't really have expected so much progress, fitness-wise, during the month. Today's accomplishment might have been aided by the evening timing, though.

I'm very much looking forward to finishing the month strong, but definitely finishing it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Two days to go now.
PPS - I'm also looking forward to adding up all my distances.

Evening running is better for me

Weight: 81.8kg
Distance: 5.52km
Time: 33m:46s
Average speed: 9.81kph

Today was a change in routine - I went for my run in the evening rather than the morning. That felt really good. Crazy good. As if, in the morning, there was no more pressure and my work was finally done. So I think I might be getting over the "run every day" challenge, but now, at this time of writing, I have only 3 days to go, and I am not breaking the chain now. I just wanted to note that it felt good to be able to get the dishes done in the morning the way I normally do.

As for the run itself, I don't know what it is about the evening, but it always feels easier. I turned the speed up to 10.3kph and the changes down in incline surprised me. My breathing came easily and, by the time I was finished, I'd turned the speed all the way up to 11kph. If evening runs are that easy, maybe tomorrow I'll try level 5 on the treadmill program.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I also had a pretty good day at work, so there's that, too.
PPS - I guess it's been a great day all around.

Every day is leg day

Weight: 82.3kg
Distance: 5.52km
Time: 34m:21s
Average speed: 9.64kph

Well, there goes the air conditioning theory of weight variation. I don't know what to think about that any more. It was tough this morning to get out of bed and to the gym, and then I felt very out of breath for a long portion of my 5km. I focused on my breathing, though - two steps in, two steps out - and got back under control by the time I was finished with the inclines. It's looking like we might not quite get our bathroom completed before the end of the month, now, which actually means I might have to keep up my morning gym visits just for the showers. Starting in February, though, I'll definitely mix it up. It won't be all cardio the way I'm doing now.

The biggest physical effect I've noticed over the month so far is in my calves and achilles tendons. They're pretty much sore and tight all the time, regardless of how much stretching I do.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd prefer to be able to say I've lost weight and gained some leg muscle.
PPS - All I'm sure of so far is that I've gained some cardio fitness.

Running on Australia Day

Weight: 78.6kg
Distance: 5.52km
Time: 34m:24s
Average Speed: 9.63kph

I'm starting to wonder whether the bathroom scale measures me lighter on mornings when we've had the aircon running at night. It dehydrates me, you see, so I think I weigh a bit less on those mornings.

Today was Australia Day, and since we had plans all day, I got up at my usual 05:30 time to hit the gym. It's made for a big day. I put the treadmill up to 10.2kph for the 5km, then up a little bit higher for the last 0.5km. It's getting a bit easier, but not so much that I think level 5 is right yet. I'll stick with level 4 for a bit longer yet.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I can see the end of the tunnel now.
PPS - Just this week and Saturday to go.

Motivation

Weight: 81.8kg
Distance: 5.52km
Time: 34m:53s
Average speed: 9.49kph

This doesn't usually work well when I'm tired. I mention it because that's how I woke up this morning. I didn't want to go, but I made myself anyway. This is why I don't agree with people who say they "just need to get motivated". No, what you need is to get out and do it. Motivation is nice, but dedication gets the work done. If your excuse is motivation, then you are the only thing in your way, and you can decide to get it done.

I didn't feel that fast this morning, but I was consistent, and I did turn up the speed a bit for the last kilometre. By the end of the month, I might be up another level on the treadmill.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Building fitness does feel quite good.
PPS - I might be disappointed to slow down at the end of the month.

A walking adventure

Weight: 82.3kg
Distance: 6.4km
Time: 1h:04m:25s
Average speed: 5.96kph

So today was a walk. That should be obvious from the speed up there. What should also be obvious is that it is possible to run 5km per day for nearly a month and put on weight. I'll make some later challenges during the year focus on weight loss. For now, I'm actually not quite sure whether I've lost girth. My 82cm waist jeans are feeling pretty loose.

I was walking in unfamiliar territory today, which is why my distance is much further than it would have been at home. I wanted to explore, so I walked out 2.6km, then turned down a side street where it all started to go wrong. There was a park in the way, then a creek to go around, then the back way through school grounds, some real angry birds (not the fun kind from the game) and a quick excape under a fence before I was back on track. It was an adventure of sorts, but if I can avoid territorial avians from now on, I will.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Fun fact about plovers: they call off their dive-bombing runs if you face them and look big.
PPS - This is more difficult when there's more than one of them.

Standard update

Weight: Unknown
Distance: 5.50km
Time: 36m:26s
Average speed: 9.06kph

I'll be brief. I didn't run the whole distance at full speed this morning. I've been sleeping badly, so I didn't feel great when I got up. I did get through my 5km, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't been home since then.
PPS - The internet is a bit patchy here, so this entry is late.

Feeling better

Weight: 80.6kg
Distance: 5.50km
Time: 34m:48s
Average speed: 9.48kph

I feel better about my run this morning. Last night I was ranting a bit, and maybe I just needed to vent, because I felt really good on the treadmill today. At least for the first while, it was as if I could do this indefinitely, and I think the ability to run 3km or so at 10kph without even thinking about it is something to be proud of.

I had to run for the train this morning, too. That's something I haven't been bothering to do, partly because there are lots of trains and missing one isn't a big deal, but also because of the sweat situation. But this morning I decided a last-minute sprint wouldn't be so bad. I can put on a fair burst of speed when I want to, though I'm no Olympic sprinter. This felt good, too. I did make the train easily ... and then broke into an epic sweat for the next 20 minutes. Some things never change, I guess.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm glad to be objectively fitter than when I started.
PPS - And that, really, has been the goal.

Fed up with treadmills

Weight: 80.6kg
Distance: 5.50km
Time: 34m:56s
Average speed: 9.45kph

I think 10kph is the most manageable speed to run my 5km at level 4 at the gym right now. That's what this experiment has become: finding the optimal treadmill speed and the optimal incline pattern level to run 5km at (plus 5-minute cool-down). It's depressing, in a way. I'm not very happy with it, to be honest. I need to get back outside, running on the footpaths again. I need the variety. I need the fresh air.

So can I get back outside yet? Can I just do my running outside and come back to shower at the gym instead of using the treadmill? Yeah, maybe. Maybe I can run after work and shower there. I have the options, but the treadmill and shower in one place is just easiest and, now, most familiar. And, possibly, a failed Kickstarter campaign: The Showermill! (Pulled after electrocution and slipperiness concerns.) I'm starting to wonder how I used to do this. I never went every day - maybe 3 times a week - but I'd still get out to run very regularly, and it never seemed like it interfered in my life quite as much as this one January project has. During my university days, I guess I'd get up at 05:00 some mornings. I was basically Batman at the time, though - trained to perfection in the prime of my life by an entire dojo of karate black belts. Those days aren't coming back. I find that a hard pill to swallow.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Other parts of my life are a lot better now than then, though.
PPS - I'm kind of curious how running on the streets will feel after this long on treadmills.

I walked

Weight: 80.6kg
Distance: 5.02km
Time: 41m:36s
Average speed: 7.24kph

Tonight, to give my legs a bit of a rest and avoid injury, I walked. Well, mostly. I set a fast walking pace of 6.5kph, and I kept to that for the first 1.5km, but I got too bored. Inactivity is not something I do. Ask my wife if I can ever sit still and she'll laugh at the very idea. So for portions of the 5km I stepped it up all the way to 9kph, which is a moderate run for me. The risk was that, tonight, I wasn't wearing the elastic braces that keep my knees from gradually exploding. I was careful, though, and they're still intact. My knees, that is. Well, the braces are intact, too. They were just getting very funky and needed washing, so tonight was a good chance to get that done.

In one sense, this sort of means I've failed. My goal was "run every day in January", and today I walked instead. Then again, I did run for a little bit, so that's something, right? Does that count?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, it's my goal, so I say it counts.
PPS - Justification is one thing we're really good at as humans.

To do: slow down or die

Weight: 80.6kg
Distance: 5.22km
Time: 34m:14s
Average Speed:

Today is the first time all month that I've had to take an anti-inflammatory tablet after a run. Now, I'd like to be all Morgan Spurlock about this and carry on regardless of risk of injury, but I think it's best that I take it easy now. I went a bit slower this morning for the 5km - just 9.5kph - and it was still a struggle.

What I may be able to do tomorrow is walk my 5km, since I have the whole evening to myself. It will still be at the gym, though. I don't think I've ever done such a thing on the treadmill before. At 6kph, it would take 50 minutes. I'm not sure I can take that many pop music videos in one hit.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Whether I like it or not, Taylor Swift in a tutu is my running companion.
PPS - I'm actually fine with that. It's a good running rhythm.

So hot all the time

Weight: 80.2kg
Distance: 5.49km
Time: 37m:06s
Average speed: 8.88kph

I chose to slow down a little bit this morning, because my calves have been bothering me and I wanted to give them a bit of a break. It wasn't much of a break, though. The stretching continues, as does the relentless heat and the continued absence of a home shower. The routine is getting to me again. I need to mix it up. Tomorrow perhaps I'll take the opportunity to run and shower in the city, as long as I can figure out how to handle my sweaty, smelly clothes afterwards. That plan might not survive contact with the enemy (Brisbane summer heat) though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - At this point, I'm just keen to finish the challenge and move on.
PPS - If I can push past this, though, maybe I can build a new habit.

That's more like it

Weight: 78.4kg
Distance: 5.49km
Time: 35m:08s
Average speed: 9.38kph

It's so hot. I haven't stopped sweating all day. Level 4 on the treadmill is where I should be, I can tell. Today's stats look identical to yesterday's, except for weight, but I did bump it up to level 4, which includes about 500m at a 3.5% incline. I worked hard for it and I got through it. I'm pleased.

I think I might be injuring my legs, but in the slowest way possible. There's really not a lot more to tell. I came, I ran, I conquered.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Still looking forward to getting back to showering at home.
PPS - I'm getting a little too familiar with the music videos at the gym.

Forget level 3

Weight: 78.5kg
Distance: 5.49km
Time: 35m:08s
Average speed: 9.36kph

This morning was rough, like sandpaper over the eyeballs. I've never had that, but I don't think it would be pleasant. Is that a thing? If so, it seems like something we should stop. Organise a protest march.

I didn't sleep well. Normally I'm out like a light, but sometimes it's hot, or I've had too much caffeine during the day or too much sugar too close to bedtime. I think last night it was caffeine. I woke up tired, less than 12 hours since my last run. My knees hurt. My calves hurt. I'm hungry. Plenty of other complaining, too. I set the treadmill to level 3 which, apparently, only means "start the 1.6km uphill stretch earlier". So tomorrow it's on to level 4.

The other thing to mention is weight. Lately I've been weighing in at night, because I've consistently forgotten in the mornings. Today I remembered, and I was pleased to find I've gone down a whole kilogram. It also renders my other measurements unreliable.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I wanted a punny name for all my challenges.
PPS - The only one I've got for this is "Runuary" and it looks even worse written down than it sounds.

Too easy

Weight: 80.5kg
Distance: 5.51km
Time: 34m:10s
Average speed: 9.68kph

It was too easy. I waited until this evening to do my run today, for reasons, and I was able to just breeze through it, no worries. It wasn't until 3.5km in that I thought anything but "this is easy", which might say something about my improving fitness and my zen state of mind. In any case, tomorrow I'll have to bump up the difficulty to level 3 and see how I go. Otherwise I'll just be cruising, not growing.

It might also have been because the aircon was on tonight, and I'm not completely sure it comes on early enough for my morning sessions to cool the whole place down. That could mean I've been running in a sweatbox in the mornings, but any evening runs are much easier. I guess I'll find out tomorrow.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Because of the changing inclines, the average speed measurements aren't that meaningful now.
PPS - If I were doing the same route on the streets every day, they'd matter much more.

I'd like to rest

Weight: 81.4kg
Distance: 5.10km
Time: 30m:30s
Average speed: 10.03kph

I hurried through my run this morning because I had to get the car home in time for Deb to drive to her prac shift. I only did a one minute cool-down, so my distance, time and speed are a bit different today. I was able to focus on my breathing throughout the run, though, and that went very well. When I have the time tomorrow and I'm not rushed, I'll do more of that.

I'm getting to the point where I recognise it would do me well to take a rest day, but that's not the deal here. My calves are starting to feel a bit sore in the mornings, so I've had to do some extra stretching. I still feel good, on the whole, but I'm glad I'm getting up to the halfway point.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm trying to resist the temptation to add up my distances early.
PPS - Trying and failing.

Breathing

Weight: 81.4kg
Distance: 5.50km
Time: 34m:49s
Average speed: 9.48kph

Breathing is more important than you think. You only really think about it when it's gone or other, rare occasions. This is a lesson in how much running on a treadmill can change things.

When I run on the streets and footpaths, I pace myself by my breath. I need to be breathing this hard right now, so I'll run this fast, two steps per breath in, two steps per breath out. If I need to slow down because I need to take deeper breaths, that's what I do, or if I can go faster and keep my breathing steady, I do that. So my pace changes with my breath and it works well. I could run almost indefinitely like that.

On the treadmill, I've gone almost two weeks before even noticing my breathing. This morning I noticed I wasn't breathing to pace. I'd been just letting my breath happen, and I think it contributed to how crappy I'd feel after a run. This morning, at about the 2km mark, I suddenly remembered that breathing was a thing and I paced my breathing to my steps, two in, two out. It helped a lot with the incline section and I felt much better afterwards. Still sweaty in the most horrible way, but better. I must remember this.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If not for the bathroom renovation, I would not have been running on the treadmill this much.
PPS - And I would not have made these realisations. I guess that's a good thing.

Fitter

Weight: 81.9kg
Distance: 5.49km
Time: 34m:55s
Average speed: 9.43kph

That weight up there is both strange and a worry. It's a worry because over a year ago we joined Weight Watchers and at that time I weighed 82kg. It was about the heaviest I've ever been as an adult. It's strange, though, because I feel really good today. Also my work trousers - a size 82 waist - fit quite well. If I'm bloating out, it's a real struggle fitting into an 82 waist and I need to bust out the size 87s. In short, I'm really not sure what's going on with my weight and I wish I'd been measuring girth instead.

My normal cardio workout at the gym right now consists of 5km at 10kph on level 2. It's taxing but possible, so that's where I'll be staying for a while. The uphill section is the real killer, of course. I'm making my peace with working out at the gym and showering there, in part because we definitely won't have a working shower at home now for at least another week. I just need to stay on top of the laundry, which I have not done today.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Tomorrow might be an evening workout as a result.
PPS - I really feel like I'm getting fitter, in general.

Hungry

Weight: 80.5kg
Distance: 5.25km
Time: 32m:11s
Average speed: 9.79kph

I wasn't sure whether I should go running this morning or wait until after church. I'm not sure which would have been more convenient, but I went before. I set the treadmill to a 5km run at level 2 which, it turns out, includes about 1.5km uphill at 2%. I didn't drop my speed at all, but I did struggle. I cut my cool-down short, too, which might have been a mistake.

Right now I'm just feeling hungry. It's close to lunch, so that should be expected, but I've been feeling this way since after my run. I did eat a bowl of cereal beforehand, but I think eggs would have been better. It probably would help with the weight, too, if I don't eat carbs for breakfast every day. Maybe I'll make that one of the challenges for later in the year - just change out my cereal for eggs and see how it goes.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've still got a lot of slots to fill in the year.
PPS - I do have February picked out, though.

Novelty

Weight: 80.5kg
Distance: 5.11km
Time: 35m:00s
Average speed: 8.76kph

To deal with the incessant boredom of the treadmill at the gym, I tried something new with it this morning. I set it to "fat burn" mode, level 4, 10kph. I thought I'd turn down my speed from 10.5 to just 10 to "take it easy". Let me tell you something right now. Running up a 5% slope at 10kph is not "taking it easy" by any measure. Three times during the workout I had to slow down to keep my heart from exploding, and this almost meant I didn't finish my 5km. I got there in the cool-down phase, though.

The fat burn program on this particuar brand of treadmill shows a chart of incline percentages over time, making it look like a series of flat runs over curiously square hills. It's hard to remember at the time that those square hills represent how steep the incline is, not the altitude. I would have liked to know the average incline over the 30 minutes, but the only statistic offered was peak incline. Still, I might try it again tomorrow, on a lower setting.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Or maybe for longer at a lower speed.
PPS - I'll let you know.

Hurry

Weight: 80.2kg
Distance: 5.53km
Time: 33m:23s
Average speed: 9.94kph

I learned an interesting lessong today: I don't need to rush so much. I've been getting out of bed at 05:30 in the morning, hurrying to the gym, running 5km on the treadmill, showering, dressing and rushing to the train to make it to work by 08:00. This morning, though I still got up at 05:30, I didn't hurry, because I'd built up a little overtime at work and could afford to come in a bit later (it's nice to be a contractor with a flexible employer). So I washed some dishes and took my time at the gym. I even strolled casually on as a train stopped at my home station and left without me, though I could have hurried and caught it. I waited for the next one. Guess what time I got to work?

08:05.

That's it. Five minutes is the only price I paid for staying on top of the dishes and not hurrying. So I think I'll keep doing that.

I'm getting bored of running on the treadmill at the gym. It's not just that it's the same place, same workout, same music on the TV every morning. Actually, I guess it is mostly that, but it's also the treadmill itself. Running on a treadmill is different to running on footpaths. On the footpath I feel like I set my own pace and, now and then, I might need to slow down to keep my heart rate within bounds. On the treadmill it's kind of like being tied to the back of a truck going at a steady pace. You'd better keep up or you'll fall. Your legs play catch-up with the surface and not the other way around. I look forward to having my own bathroom again so that I can run on the streets, the way it should be.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I hate feeling rushed in anything.
PPS - It's just no fun.

Pushing

Weight: 81.5kg
Distance: 5.52km
Time: 33m:05s
Average speed: 10.01kph

I lied to my watch today. It said yesterday was a rest day, to which I said "pish posh", put on my monocle and top hat and ran my 5km anyway, because I am a determined gentleman. Today it implored me to take a rest day again, which is to say for the first time, really, and so I let it believe that I had done so. What it doesn't know can't hurt it. It might hurt me, I suppose, but the watch's conscience is clear.

I compulsively push myself just a little bit harder each day. Surely, I say to myself, if I managed 10.5kph yesterday for 5km, I must be capable of 10.8 today. You may recognise this as a foolish trajectory up into the stratosphere, but I attempted it nevertheless. Rest assured, though, that I had slowed down again by the end of the treadmill's programmed interval. I may think I'm Superman, Batman and Spiderman rolled into one glorious SuperBatSpider hero, but my middle-aged knees are all over that hubris. They've got it covered. Ain't puttin' up with my nonsense for long, is what I'm saying.

I'm getting tired of the treadmill at the gym, but until we have a spout that can shoot water at my naked body from the wall in our house again, I must submit to the ones at the gym, and that means making the motions of exercise there. Otherwise, somehow, I feel like I'm "cheating", when I actually pay for all of this. I should be able to shower there any time if I want, but I feel I must work out first. For now, at least, I have the excuse of the challenge.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think I've done this perfectly even once.
PPS - Every morning I forget at least one thing.

The after-work running schedule

Weight: 80.8kg
Distance run: 5.52km
Time: 33m:40s
Average speed: 9.84kph

I tried something new today. I slept in until 06:00 and went running after work instead. On the plus side was the extra 30 minutes of sleep and not sweating on the train to work. The disadvantages were that I didn't get home properly until about 19:20. Also I generally feel guilty spending time on something just for me if I could instead be spending that time with Debbie. It was a bit more comfortable, though, because it was in the cool of the evening instead of the morning.

I also started breaking in some new leather boots (Dr Martens, a Christmas present) today, so I've had my foot bones in a weird shape all day, some blisters on my heels, and the exercise watch told me today was a "rest day", but none of those things is the boss of me.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Going at 10.5kph for 5km wasn't so bad.
PPS - It felt easy at the beginning, but I'm glad I didn't bump the speed up in response.

Speed

6 January
Weight: 81.5
Distance run: 5.53km
Time: 32m:39s
Average speed: 10.16kph

It's getting tricky to write something new about running every day, but I consider that part of the challenge, too. I've started pushing my speed higher, which does come at a price. I remain very sweaty until I'm halfway to work. I struggle more with the run itself. I do risk injury. I know all this. The advantage, when I have to squeeze this workout in before a day at the office is that I can get it done up to ninety seconds faster! So, you know. Totally worth it.

Laundry is becoming a problem, actually. I only have a few sets of workout clothes and, obviously, I can't reuse them day to day. Mornings are also the time I get a lot of my chores done, so laundry is falling behind, along with the dishes and my various inboxes. Committing this much time to running is having more of an impact on my life than I expected, but I think I can cope. It's still only day 6 of 31, though, which means I'm not even 20% done with this challenge.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I know I said it wasn't about weight loss, but that number climbing up is a worry.
PPS - I've been hungry.

Forgetting

5 January
Weight: Quantum uncertainty
Distance run: 5.53km
Time: 32m:54s
Average speed: 10.08kph

I'm not completely confident of that average speed up there, mostly because I forgot to write it down when I got off the treadmill. And I forgot to weigh myself before going to the gym. Then I forgot to gel my hair before going to work. Turns out, if you mess up my morning routine enough, you could probably get me to forget to put on pants before I leave the house. The run was good, but I didn't finish, according to the exercise watch (all hail Watch and his tiny kingdom). It seems like something that should bother me, but I've rationalised that if I finished 5km today, I'm doing well. I'll need to do it the exact same way tomorrow, too.

Getting dressed for work at the gym, having just showered there, feels very strange, and not just because I'm the only one in long sleeves. It's not the right place for that, you know? It was also too hot, so there's that. I blasted the car A/C on the very short drive home, but I still had some sweat to dry on the train which, I'm desperately hoping, was not especially rank, as odours go. Someone did sit next to me, so it probably wasn't that bad.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Tomorrow, do it again.
PPS - So far this month, I've run just over 28km.

Last day of holidays

4 January
Weight: 81.5
Distance run: 5.49km
Time: 35m:00s
Average speed: 9.41kph

It's been a bit of a busy day, so I'm just checking in now. I did run this morning and showered at the gym, which still makes me feel a little bit icky. At least today I remembered my thongs, so I have slightly lowered my chance of catching a horrible foot fungus. I did, however, forget my watch entirely, so that's fun. Also, just for kicks, we went swimming today and I technically swam 2 x 50m laps, but just barely.

It's tomorrow I'm kind of worried about. Tomorrow I go back to work, and to fit in my run and a shower I'll have to give up everything about my morning routine, including breakfast, which I'll be eating at work. My morning routine is my sanity for the day, so this might be big, or it might be just another blip on the radar when my bathroom looks like a construction zone. We'll see.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I didn't anticipate how disruptive a bathroom renovation would be.
PPS - Then again, it's pushing me to the gym more, so there's that.

The worst possible time to renovate your bathroom

3 January
Weight: 79.5kg
Distance run: 5.6km
Time: 35m:00s
Average speed: 9.6kph

Told you the scales weren't accurate. Today, we have successfully destroyed our bathroom, right down to the wall studs and bare floor. Of course this is in order to build it back up again into something more awesome, but until the job is finished, the only place I have to shower is the gym. So that's also what we did today. I pushed my speed at times up to 11kph, but then had a 5-minute cool-down at 6kph, which is why the average speed is so relatively low.

Yesterday I pulled a hip flexor (I think - my anatomical knowledge is somewhere between my knowledge of biology in general and cooking) and I was worried that it might affect me for the rest of the month if I couldn't rest it, but it seems 24 hours is plenty of time for that. I try not to push myself extra-hard normally, and injuries are a great excuse to take a day off, or a week, or sometimes a month, if I forget that I'm being lazy. I'm glad it only affected me for a short time.

The other minor event of note is a flat battery in my heart monitor which normally suggests to me how fast and how long I should be running. Today I turned it on and it (mostly) happily reported my pulse, but wouldn't tell me whether I was going too fast or slow. I'm pretty sure it would have been satisfied with my progress, though. That's right, I'm running to please a machine. I don't need to, as such. Nobody else is monitoring it, just me. Still, sometimes I feel its judgemental stare from my bedside table. I'll do better tomorrow, watch. I will. I promise.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Showering at the gym is not very pleasant, but it will work.
PPS - It reminds me of campground showers.

Sweat

2 January
Weight: 78.8
Distance run: 5.86km
Time: 36m:43s
Average speed: 9.57kph

I should mention at this point that I don't think our bathroom scale is that accurate. It seems to change readings in part, I believe, due to atmospheric pressure changes. Anyway, today I don't want to talk about sweat, but I feel I have to. Even if I run early in the morning and, as happened today, I get rained on, come home and take a cool shower and even try to air-dry to shed even more excess heat, no matter what I do, I'll step out of the shower and immediately begin sweating bullets. It's a thing my body does. My body temperature is always a little above normal, so running doesn't help that. The only cure I know is sitting in front of a fan for half an hour or more, sweating away the heat, trying not to touch anything. This is the price I'll pay to go running every day.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm trying not to rest my arms on my desk as I type this.
PPS - It's disgusting, I know.

It's not about weight loss

1 January
Weight: 79.5kg
Distance run: 5.66km
Time: 37m:39s
Average speed: 9.01kph

I'm measuring my weight during January, as I run every day because I expect it to have an effect, but the goal is overall cardio fitness. Today I had to wait until the afternoon to run because I slept in after some New Year's Eve revelry and today, like most days, was around 31C in Brisbane. Plus some stuff came up.

I'm not really sure what the cause and effect relationship is, but when I run lots, I feel like eating better, and both of those things together contribute to loss of weight and girth. I might not consider it to be about weight loss, but I'm hardly going to turn it away at the door. So these measurements will continue. Posts may be morning or night, depending on when I run and whether I have anything to say about it that day.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I consider my ideal weight to be about 70kg.
PPS - During 2014, I was steadily putting on weight just about all year.

Running in January

I'm hoping to do something a bit different this year. Twelve months, twelve monthly challenges. Some will be fitness-related, others will be artistic or creative. Some I might not have thought of yet. I have 11 months to get around to deciding what December will be. For January, though, my challenge to myself is this: run every day. I enjoy running, but I slack off regularly, so I'm going to go every single day for all of January. I'll be running about 5km per day, since that's about the distance required by the heart monitor watch my Dad got me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It varies the intensity and time, but it always seems to work out to running about 5km. I have a standard route to follow and on most days I'll be doing this before breakfast. Some days it might be at the gym, if it rains, or in sprints on the treadmill, interspersed with weights. Whatever the form, it will be every day. Count on that.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'll be writing progress here, assuming it's interesting enough.
PPS - Happy New Year, everyone!

Crane tagging

Lately it has become a hobby of mine to fold little paper cranes from sticky notes and leave them in public, in visible places that people don't tend to go. Sometimes it's surprising how long one will stay there, given how many people must walk past it regularly.

In a way, it's a bit like graffiti, I suppose. I "tag" my locations with my creations, and it is definitely a signature. It's just not permanent. I understand why people mark places like that, though. It's a weird little feeling of power to walk through a place and know that you've marked it as your own, even if nobody knows it but you.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Maybe it's a kind of nesting instinct.
PPS - Which is a weird way to think about graffiti.

DIY

Although I do it myself in software sometimes, I still find it an odd statement, creatively, to say "I couldn't find anything like what I wanted, so I made it myself". When you're talking about creative work, the appreciation and the construction are two semi-independent skillsets. Appreciating art does not confer the ability to create it, though creating it does strengthen the ability to appreciate it. If, for instance, you're looking for a podcast full of writing tips or insider info, and you can't find one that appeals to you, deciding to make it yourself means you need the same education the podcast would be providing, but from other sources. So you couldn't find the podcast, but to make it, you had to replace it with something else anyway.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Your limitations may come up before you succeed at this endeavour.
PPS - "Nobody had painted a better Mona Lisa yet, so I did," is not an artist statement likely to win friends.

Hollywood chains

I think it's a little bit interesting to link up names of famous people that match first to last. For instance, Nicholle Tom -> Tom Arnold -> Arnold Schwartzeneggar. What is the longest possible one? If you insist on including Arnie, I think your only possible path is backwards from there, and I hadn't heard of Nicholle Tom until I went looking. I'm sure there are others.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I can't find anyone working backwards from Kevin Bacon.
PPS - Or forwards, for that matter.

Why I started using Pushbullet

For some time I was using Firefox as my primary web browser everywhere - at home and at work, on my netbook and also on my phone via the mobile version. I would often pull open tabs from one device to another via the Sync functionality, and it worked pretty well ... as long as it had synchronised by the time I wanted to pull the tabs around and I hadn't closed the source browser before the sync had finished.

Then my phone started misbehaving, I started a new job where Chrome worked better with the web proxy and the whole system fell apart. I looked briefly at XMarks, which is supposed to have cross-browser tab sync, but I couldn't get that working at all.

So I installed Pushbullet, based mostly on the fact that it was a channel available in IFTTT. Now, even though I'm using Firefox at home, Chrome at work and the stock Android browser on my phone, I can push tabs instantly from one device to any other, as well as send small files to and fro and get weather alerts via IFTTT. It's very handy. It was an adjustment to go from a "pull" mentality to "push", but not bad.

The one feature that doesn't quite work is sending SMS from my desktop - I can send texts just fine, and I know they are received because people respond, but there is no record of them going out at all. Not on my phone, not on the Pushbullet browser plugin. Other people have this problem with the feature and for some of them it works to go out and back in to the messaging app or restart their phones. That hasn't worked for me, but I'm not too concerned. I'm very happy with the other features and I plan to keep using them for some time.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm very happy with the way another machine doesn't have to be online for a push.
PPS - I prefer my multi-machine software to allow that.

Christmas excitement

As I've grown older, as happens with most people, Christmas has become more about stress than happy family times. In part, this is because family times can bring stress, and the presents that distract us from that stress go away or get less exciting when we get older. This year, however, I'm feeling excited for Christmas. It's a weird feeling. We have the same lights up as last year, the same number of presents and no substantial difference in our plans for the day itself. Something must be different, though. I've got some gifts to give that I'm keen to see opened, but others that disappoint me. One hasn't arrived yet, at the time of writing, because my online shopping was late.

Maybe that's it. Last year, I had all of December to stress and plan and shop and stress. This year we've started late, compressing all my Christmas energy into a shorter time. Is that plausible? I don't know. I'm tired right now, so my introspection gland isn't working properly. The whole point is that I plan to have a great Christmas, and I wish the same for you.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I get to spend a lot of time with my nephew, which will be pretty great.
PPS - Assuming he doesn't exhaust me immediately.

The story of the Wattle Fairy scam

I had a clever friend in primary school who figured out how to manipulate his parents based on their desire to maintain his child-like belief in things like the tooth fairy and Santa. He made up something he called the Wattle Fairy who, so he said, would give you a present if you left a wattle flower by your bed at night. He told me about this and I tried it, then was deeply disappointed the next morning to find that the wattle fairy had not left me a gift. I cried to my parents about it who got very awkward suddenly. When I told my friend it didn't work, he said of course it didn't, because you have to tell your parents beforehand. I didn't get it even then. Does that make me a dim kid or just gullible?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've always assumed the former.
PPS - Disappointment is shaped like a wilted wattle flower.

Standing out and fitting in

I do have hipsterish tendencies, in that I enjoy being the unusual exception to the rule. Although it was a pain, at school I enjoyed being the only one taking both Maths C and Drama when they scheduled the exams together and I had to raise an objection. When I was employed at a consulting engineering firm, although it held me back, I liked having a degree that was unrecognised by Engineers Australia, whose accreditation program was intimately linked with the company's promotion practices. I just somehow get a kick out of throwing off expectations. The usual result, of course, is just a momentary "Oh", and then being ignored.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So I guess the lesson is that outliers tend to be ignored.
PPS - And if you aim to be that outlier, you're aiming to be ignored for not fitting the pattern.

You can't take it with you

When people stopped believing in any kind of afterlife, the saying "You can't take it with you when you go" stopped meaning anything. If you don't believe you've got anywhere to go after death, then who cares if you can't take it with you? You don't need it when you're dead, you need it now, when you're alive, and who cares if you die with a lot of stuff or a little? In that mindset, it matters that you have had a comfortable life, not that there's no eternal safe-deposit box for your stuff when you snuff it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Which is not what I personally believe, but I do follow the logic.
PPS - It's a difference of assumptions.

Peer-to-peer MMOs

Since City of Heroes shut down - or even since the announcement, really - I've wondered about how to make MMO games robust against that kind of existential threat. When such games become unprofitable, development ceases and the servers are shut down. That's just business. The obvious answer to that problem is to host the game itself on a peer-to-peer network of player machines. Then, no matter how much the game grows or shrinks, there's always enough server capacity.

However, running a game like that on a peer-to-peer network raises some other challenges. For one, there's the matter of trusting the server code and preventing cheating. If the players, technically, have access to all the server code running on their own machines for each other, there's no central, trusted arbitrator for tasks like random number generation and application of the rules. I've outlined before how some trust can be established between peers for generating random numbers, so it's possible it could be worked around, but it requires a lot more communication than an implicitly-trusted server does. It's also probably not the full story for everything that's needed for a trusted peer network of this type.

Still, I'd like to see it attempted, if only to know that, in the future, there's a definite way to save these games from destruction when they become unprofitable, or for smaller, niche games to get a leg up when they're starting out and can't afford dedicated server hardware.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - On the City of Heroes front, a new game called Valiance Online has started open public testing.
PPS - Which is a long way from a complete game, but more than I've seen in a while.

Snowdrift could fund free software

I really like the idea put forward by snowdrift.coop, encouraging people to set aside some money to fund beneficial open-source projects so that everyone can benefit. The more people pledge to support a given project, the more funding that project gets, growing exponentially. On the receiving end, it seems like a great way to get this kind of project funded, since the people - particularly big companies - each give a little money to build up the common goods in software.

On the other hand, it still relies on charitable giving. Yes, if you fund the development of, say, OpenSSL, which almost everyone uses, then you get active development and the benefits of a well-supported library with motivated developers and proper funding instead of a library casually (but passionately) developed by volunteers in their spare time. But if everyone else funds the project and you don't, you still get that benefit. I'm not clear how Snowdrift solves that problem, except that witholding your funding means a greater chance that the development will stall and you won't get the benefits at all.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Which is just a statement of the snowdrift problem, I realise.
PPS - I'm not quite sure if that counts as circular.

Smart furniture meets sloppy housekeeping

I've seen occasional videos and concept drawings of small living spaces made more functional with fold-away furniture or reconfigurable room dividers. The thing that always strikes me about such concepts is how tidy the whole place needs to be, and how that compares to my house. If my kitchen table had to be bare to fold it away to get out the TV, well, we would have it forever folded away and would eat on the couch all the time. Or if the ground had to be clear to pull out the bed, we'd probably end up with a half-usable bed and a growing pile of life's detritus in the corner of the room. We just have a tendency for things - the stuff of life - to pile up in the corners, out of the way, and get forgotten for two or three years.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's not as bad as that sounds.
PPS - Except in some areas.

The redundant beverage dispenser

Did it bother anyone else that the Heart of Gold ship in the most recent Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie contained a weirdly imperfect beverage dispenser (as per the joke in the books) but also a perfect food replicator hooked up to a mind-reading device designed to detect cravings? I mean, if Arthur craved a cup of tea, why go to the machine that produces something that merely resembles tea instead of the much better machine that would do a perfect job? Why have the beverage dispenser on the ship at all?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's assuming the craving-machine does work any better than the beverage dispenser.
PPS - The craving-detector would be a very useful thing in our house, even without the food replicator part.

Preventing monopolies

Monopolies are bad. We know that. Oligopolies, where a few big businesses control most of the market, are also bad. So what factors make an acceptable level of competition, or what features flag an unacceptable level of complacent non-competition? It's tricky. I think it's more complicated than realising how much of the market is controlled by how many companies. Presumably, though, there's some number of companies required to make conspiracy untenable. I'd guess it's about twelve, the number of people we put on a jury in the understanding that such a group is too hard to sway as a whole. Whatever the number is, we need at least that many companies competing in every market to prevent monopolistic practices.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Making sure that happens is going to be crazy-difficult.
PPS - Especially when someone creates a brand new product.

Personal space on planes

When I read opinion pieces about air travel and leg room, reclining chairs and all things related to personal space, I think of the current designs for car trailers on trucks. See, when I was a kid, if a truck was hauling cars, they would be lined up in two layers of three, nose to tail. Then someone designed this nifty new way of cramming more cars onto a trailer at a lot of weird angles including one hanging over the truck cabin and hauling cars by truck became a lot more efficient with a lot less wasted space.

My point is this: you might think that your current personal space and comfort woes are about as bad as they can get on a plane right now, but just wait until someone clever figures out how to stack human beings in weird and interesting patterns to fit twice as many into the space as currently fit and you'll wish you lived back in the good old days when our only concern was having barely enough room for our knees and people reclining their seats at us, all facing forwards and upright.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Almost nothing is as completely bad as it could be.
PPS - We humans are great at making things worse for each other.

Quitting anything will bring cravings

I can't say that I've ever had to quit smoking or drinking, having never done either of those things at all, let alone enough to be addicted. I am aware, however, that a lot of people approach the Big Quit by looking for an external force that's going to make it happen, whether that's hypnotherapy, acupuncture, the patch, nicotine gum or inhalers to "handle the cravings". And before I get going, I need to stress again that I literally have no first-hand experience with how intense those cravings can be. Still, here it goes.

There are going to be cravings. Lots of them, strong, hard and frequent. That's how you know you're getting over an addiction. The craving is a withdrawal symptom, and you're not going to be able to quit without getting them. What you need to do, however, is to recognise, anticipate and accept that these cravings will happen, and let them pass without satisfying them. Then do it again and again, as long as they come, for the rest of your life, because that's what quitting means.

By all means, get support, call people, talk to your doctor, read about it, substitute better behaviours, but for goodness' sake, don't keep taking in exactly as much nicotine as before. You don't expect someone who has "quit drinking" to take a little nip every now and then to get over their cravings, do you? If you quit sugar you don't have a little chocolate now and then just to keep the edge off. If you quit, then you quit. Don't half-ass this. It's your life and you're going to be the one making the change.

"But," you say, "it's really hard!" Yes. Yes it is. Of course it is. If it weren't, then they wouldn't bother putting the addictive stuff into cigarettes in the first place, and there wouldn't be a whole industry also built around helping you quit smoking, would there? If it were easy, you'd just decide to quit and then there'd be no step 2. So prepare yourself for a hard job and stick to it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And if losing weight were easy, we'd have an epidemic of skinniness on our hands.
PPS - Which would be very strange.

Personal disaster planning

Whatever role you are in, it's important for everyone around you to have an idea of what you do and how they could replace you in case you were hit by a bus tomorrow. It doesn't even have to be such a permanent situation as that. If you broke your leg and had to stay home from work for six weeks, how would the business cope? In some cases - menial work - there won't be much of a problem. Someone else will cover your shift, some other person with similar skills can fill in on a temp basis, no big deal. In some other roles, though - husband, parent, museum curator - your disappearance or disablement may cause serious disruption to the people around you. If you are proactive about this, you should prepare for this eventuality. I call this "the black envelope".

Inside the black envelope is everything anyone would need in case you are no longer available to fill your role, permanently or only temporarily. What you do day to day, how you do it and where everything important is kept. It's like putting together a job handover package before it's necessary, because you might not get to deliver all the information in person.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I actually don't have one of my own yet.
PPS - But, like backups, I've been meaning to start any day now.

Importance

Sometimes it happens that a particular subgroup of employees will go on strike for better pay or better conditions. I don't have a problem with fighting for your rights or for your basic living requirements, but I think sometimes people lose sight of the fact that they are part of a much bigger machine. "You can't run a hospital without nurses." That's true. It doesn't make you the only important part, though. You also can't run a hospital without doctors. You can't run it very well for very long without janitors or administrators, either. You can't run a (modern) city without sanitation workers, but you also can't run it without power workers or water supply or police or firefighters or ambulances.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Being critical to a complex system's success doesn't make you more important than anyone else.
PPS - You're just important. Be happy with that, and get what you need.

How 3D-printed toys will work

I have a feeling that domestic 3D printing is going to be a real breaking change to the toy industry. Rather than having mountains of plastic rubbish in the house that gets used for a few weeks, broken and discarded, a home 3D printing system (with plastic recycling) can print off any toy you like, then take it back to be turned into something new or just restored if it was particularly loved. The toys that pile up in the corners of the room and are never used any more can be shovelled into the recycler to be made into new toys when the need arises.

So how will the toy industry adapt? Well, one of the most obvious steps is to sell toy designs for 3D printers. Rather than printing Turtle Man 07b from some knock-off download, kids will value having genuine toy designs from the original source. Yes, it will matter to them. Think back to your own childhood and try to remember if it mattered that the label on your clothes was genuine, that you owned a real Nintendo console or even that you ate brand-name cereal for breakfast. It matters to kids.

Selling printers and branded feedstock might matter, though possibly not as much. Particularly sinister companies might sell printers that are designed to sit and monitor the TV, only unlocking or downloading exclusive printer models if it sees the right ads. Basically, you have to watch our cartoon and all the ads if you want the cool new spaceship model for the week.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's going to be a different world.
PPS - But it's probably not going to be here for a while.

The lottery prediction meta-lottery

For the low price of one dollar, I will predict for you whether you will win the lottery this week. I guarantee 99.9% accuracy or your money back. Think about the money you'll save by only paying me $1 on weeks when you would have lost anyway, when it costs much more than that to enter the lottery!

Now I'm going to spoil my business plan by telling you this: I'll just always answer "no", and it still works, because all I've done is set up a cheaper lottery with almost no payout (in part because, if you pay me for my prediction and you win anyway, I'm the least of your concerns).

The only problem is if someone pays me my dollar, I tell them "no win", then they pick the winning numbers without playing and sue me for the prize money they should have won.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course, the only way to prove you "would have" won is to actually register the entry.
PPS - And it's probably not going to happen anyway, because that's how lotteries work.

Real hoverboards

So it looks like we are finally getting real hoverboards. This has been a source of prank material for quite some time, beginning with a Back to the Future behind the scenes documentary and including a recent video with Tony Hawk pretending to ride one. Now there's a Kickstarter campaign and another video of Tony Hawk. This time, however, I'm inclined to believe it, mostly because it looks like it's impossible to steer. If you were going to produce a video of a fake hoverboard, you'd be inclined to make it look more ridable. As it is, this one seems to handle like a block of ice on a sheet of glass. Oh, and it has to be used on a non-magnetic metallic surface, too, so unless you have copper footpaths or, as in the video, a copper halfpipe, it won't be nearly as exciting as it sounds.

Still, the production of a self-contained, non-superconductor electromagnetic hovering effect is quite the accomplishment, and just in time for 2015 - the year featured in Back to the Future Part 2.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Also, since Tony Hawk apologised for the prank video, I doubt he'd do a second fake one.
PPS - The Kickstarter campaign is here: Hendo Hoverboards.

Security, privacy and spies

How do you define cybersecurity? To me, it is the resistance of computer systems to unauthorised access of any form. And how do you define digital privacy? Well, to me, it is the ability to keep secret anything I wish to remain secret. Okay, so how do you keep secrets on computers? Well, by preventing unauthorised access, of course.

This is why I say that security and privacy are the same thing, and if you try to give up some digital privacy to get better security, you're going about it completely backwards. What people are usually thinking of is spycraft and, in that case, yes, giving up some of your digital privacy does result in easier spy work. Just keep in mind that spies aren't (directly) keeping you safe. Spies are, in essence, a kind of covert *assault* force. The extent to which they keep you safe is just the extent to which they manage to smite your enemies. If everyone has different locks on their doors, then breaking into one house doesn't open up everyone to attack. The thing is, online, everyone lives behind the same door.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, to an extent, in a manner of speaking.
PPS - Like all analogies, that one has its flaws.

Just get started

There are a lot of articles I've read lately about making games, specifically how to "get started". Most of them begin by saying "Just get started. Make something and you'll get better to make new things." That's not very helpful if the actual question was "I am thinking of making a game, and I don't yet know how to make images move on the screen. Can you help me?" and your response is "Just do it". There are some specific technical questions behind the first "how do I get started", and I think these game-making mentors should start with "these are the tools I use, this is specifically how I built my first game". That's more helpful than a vague motivational speech about keeping at your art to get the skills you will need later.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Motivation is good, too.
PPS - It's just that specifics help more sometimes.

Blind computing

If you were designing a computer operating system from the ground up for blind people, what would that be like? You'd probably have to ask a blind person to help you, or blindfold yourself while you worked on it. Watching Tommy Edison using his Mac with the help of the screen narrator was like watching him fumble around in the dark. He was able to do it, but it was clearly blind-enabled as an afterthought to the primary design. Computers are about the one place where you'd think he would be able to find a level playing field, but all our normal desktop operating systems, software and websites are built assuming you have vision.

An operating system built for blind people would be - should be completely different to any existing desktop OS of today, just as a phone for blind people needs to be something better than stock Android on a featureless glass touch screen with an assistant to read out what you're doing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've seen a blind man using a touch-screen phone on the train.
PPS - It did not seem easy for him.